c. 1998 Religion News Service

(Rabbi Rudin is the national interreligious affairs director of the American Jewish Committee)

UNDATED _ The Academy Award-winning 1937 film”The Life of Emile Zola”was shown on television the other day.

Each time I see the late, great Paul Muni in the title role, I am deeply stirred by his portrayal of the courageous novelist who exactly one century ago publicly challenged the anti-Semitic actions of the French government during the ugly Dreyfus affair. Zola’s challenge was an impassioned open letter addressed to the president of the French Republic.

It was entitled”J’accuse!”(I accuse!) and it is the mother of all op-ed pieces.

Zola intended”J’accuse!,”which was published in a leading Paris newspaper, to be”a revolutionary means of hastening the explosion of truth and justice.”Indeed, it was.

Four days after Zola’s letter appeared in print, anti-Semitic riots broke out in more than 11 French cities, including Bordeaux and Marseilles. Anti-Jewish violence also took place in French-controlled Algeria.

Zola himself was immediately sued for defamation by the minister of war, quickly put on trial, found guilty, and sentenced to one year in prison. Zola avoided jail by fleeing to London, where he remained until he could safely return to Paris.

One of the movie’s highlights comes when Muni roars Zola’s powerful phrase,”Truth is on the march,”and I always want to believe him. I really want to believe that 100 years ago France was purged of its anti-Semitism by heroes like Zola who risked their careers and lives to save Alfred Dreyfus, the innocent Jewish artillery officer who was framed and falsely accused of treason because of his religion.

While Zola and his colleagues were ultimately successful in clearing Dreyfus’ name, the long, 10-year struggle to achieve the goal involved the army, the political and legal systems, the press, and the Roman Catholic Church. It bitterly divided France.

The scars of the Dreyfus affair remain to this day. It often seems some things in history are never settled and one issue that clearly won’t go away is the persistence of anti-Semitism in France.

The historian Paul Johnson noted one disastrous result of the Dreyfus affair was the”institutionalization”of French anti-Semitism.

The League of the French Fatherland, one reactionary organization established during the Dreyfus affair, writes Johnson, later became a”pro-fascist … movement which formed the most vicious element in the Vichy regime, 1941-44, and helped to send hundreds of thousands of French Jews”to their deaths during the Holocaust. Among those victims was Dreyfus’ granddaughter, Madeleine, who died at Auschwitz in August 1944.

The wretched collaborationist record of the pro-German Vichy government was recently in the news when Maurice Papon, a former police official, was convicted for his World War II activities, including the round-up of French Jews for deportation to Nazi death camps.

Incredibly, Papon, now in his 80s, not only served his Vichy masters until France was liberated, but in the years following the war he became a respected cabinet member involved in security issues. The families of Papon’s victims have expressed satisfaction with his conviction, but Papon has appealed the decision and it is questionable whether he will ever go to jail given his advanced age and deteriorating health.

If Zola were alive today, he would be profoundly sickened by the electoral success of Jean-Marie Le Pen and his right-wing political party.

While Le Pen’s group is still a minority within the Chamber of Deputies, his corrosive influence on French politics is growing. And if Le Pen had been active in 1898 instead of 1998, there is little doubt his persistent anti-Jewish tirades and other reactionary views would have been warmly welcomed by the political, military, and clergy cabal that relentlessly persecuted Dreyfus and his supporters until truth and justice were finally served.

And sadly, Zola’s powerful words warning of the pathology of anti-Semitism remain as accurate and meaningful today as when they were first uttered in the 1890s:”… I have been following with increasing surprise and disgust the campaign which some people are trying to carry on in France against the Jews. This seems to me monstrous … blind and foolish, which would carry us back several centuries, and which would end in the worst of abominations, religious persecution.” Vive Emile Zola! Vive”J’accuse!”

MJP END RUDIN